Notables from the Daily Smush

The Daily Smush is what I call my commute in my head. Some days it's less smushy than others (if I leave rather late or rather early, for example) but most of the time, it's quite the smush.  Today, I was pressed up against the doors on a very full BART car as we went under the bay, and against my back I could feel an occasional thump, thump, thump in the tunnel - I'm sure this was wind and air pressure buffeting the doors and ricocheting off the tunnel walls, but of course, my head actually thought: "We're under the bay - we must be hitting some fish as we go by." Herp derp derp. Sometimes, my brain cracks me up.

Also, the new building that the office is in has interesting elevators - I keep meaning to take a sneaky picture of them, but, you know, as elevators there is a high chance someone else will happen upon me in that moment and I haven't dared to take such a picture yet. The point is, they are interesting because you can only choose what floor you want to go to from the outside - the inside has no buttons at all. I haven't quite worked out if I think this is cool or just terribly inefficient (there are three elevators, one might be in use to take me to floor 4 ((you stand at the keypad outside, push the floor number, and it tells you whether to go to door A, B, or C, and you go to said elevator, then woosh- up you go) and another one to take someone to floor 19, therefore using two elevators for generally 'up' directions, instead of the traditional 'we both want to go up, what floor are you, four, okay, you?, 19, okay' model). I feel like it must say something about the corporate world I dabble in here, but I haven't figured out what that is yet.

Also, I happened to be walking down the street from the train station this morning and I heard someone exclaim to the person next to them (while gesticulating and pushing away a piece of paper that the other was holding) "You know what? F*** math, f*** numbers!!" which just made me smile as I wandered off to my office of math and numbers. I have no idea what they were talking about, but it's probably not the math I like anyway.

Finally, last night, I had dinner with friends - work friends, school friends, new friends - at a beautiful house up past the Berkeley hills in an area called Kensington. The house is more beautiful than I can describe and my friend Kate made us an incredible dinner - an amazing pork roast (a departure from the kosher household I grace on a daily basis), ratatouille (made from scratch from veggies at the Lake Merritt Farmer's Market), and green beans gently sauteed with some olive oil and then topped with lemon juice from a lemon I brought from the tree. And we ate in this dining room:

 The lemon also happened to be pear- or teardrop-shaped (REALLY), and I didn't get a picture of it, but it inspired a conversation that went something like this.
"Haha, that lemon is so weird looking! It's a pear-lemon, or apple-lemon..."
--"Don't make fun of it, it's just a bit confused about its identity."
"Well, that makes sense, it's from Berkeley. Lots of folks are confused about their identities."
--"Yeah, especially with so many fruits around."

Also, there were some dogs around (of course ), which makes me so happy, including Bama, who featured a few posts ago:

Picturesque as ever. Here, she doesn't look at all like Bamalamadingdong, which is her name when she acts rather goofy and bounces off the walls. But she's just a wee thing (about 2), so that huge energy makes sense.

And now, I'm at the office. Tuesday, and my last day of on-site work is Friday. How can this summer almost be over?

This is how I feel about summer right now. :) Let's do this.